Within a global hierarchy of aesthetic value, certain cities – Athens, Rome, and Bangkok among them – become sites of capital accumulation that converts “symbolic density” (understood as a concentration of important historical and religious sites) into real estate value. This process reverses the 19-century absorption of workers in city centers, providing cultural “reasons” for mass forced evictions. The political marginality of the displaced populations becomes a sometimes stark spatial marginality, creating a geography of prejudice that leaves the city centers in the hands of gentrifiers and real-estate speculators. While the three cities under consideration present specific areas of difference, they all mark the overflow of the social and economic effects of colonial expansion, and the differences among them – and among the processes of marginalization they exhibit – point to underlying processes that today’s geopolitical realities are making increasingly recognizable. While some historical conservation is locally approved, the suffering and social destruction that it causes – especially where most people live in rented properties – is rarely addressed. It reinforces the racialization of power hierarchies both in the shaping of urban space and in the distribution of social and ethnic groups, laying potential grounds for massive future unrest.

Michael Herzfeld, a social anthropologist, is Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus, Harvard University; IIAS Visiting Professor of Critical Heritage Studies Emeritus, Leiden University; and affiliated with the University of Rome “Tor Vergata.” Author of 14 books and numerous articles and reviews, and producer of two ethnographic films, he has edited American Ethnologist (1995-98) and Journal of Modern Greek Studies (2023-24) and is currently co-editor of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.  His research in Greece, Italy, and Thailand has addressed historic conservation, gentrification, the dynamics of nationalism and bureaucracy, crypto-colonialism, and the ethnography of knowledge.